The Articles of Confederation had no legal weight after the ratification of the Constitution, so its perpetuity language became null-and-void. Given the absence of any explicit prohibition against a state withdrawing, and the absence of any rhetoric among the ratification debates and Federalist Papers, to the effect that a state has no right to withdraw after joining the Union, one can make the logical inference that perpetuity was more hopeful rhetoric for the struggling new nation than law, and also in practice that perpetuity refers more to the tenets of the Constitution rather than membership in the Union by a state.
Justice Chase states: The Constitution, in all its provisions, looks to an indestructible Union composed of indestructible States. If he truly believed that, or followed it to its logical conclusion, the Union can survive with some members leaving, whereas a state cannot be considered indestructible if it does not have the ultimate recourse to the encroachment of Federal power that withdrawing provides. It would be swallowed and melted into a Union against the wishes of its citizens.
He states further: When Texas became one of the United States, she entered into an indissoluble relation. The union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original States. This is what I was referring to in an earlier reply as making a prohibition out of whole cloth. He simply states it as a fact, but does not cite any authority. Neither the Chief Justice, the Supreme Court, nor anyone in the judiciary has the Constitutional authority to create such a prohibition. Appealing to the Preamble, of all parts, shows the weakness of his argument.
And that is why I can state, without any hesitation of my own, that your belief that the decision is without foundation legally or constitutionally is meaningless. Your opinion has no legal standing at all. The only opinions that matter were those of the Chief Justice and the four associate justices who agreed with him that the actions of the Texas legislature were without standing in the law. They were null, they violated the Constitution, they were illegal, however you want to put it. That fact will not change regardless of how loudly you state their decision to be, in effect, making legislation or how often you proclaim that the Constituion doesn't say what the court said it did.